When Carrol wrote about dogmatism I diverged from his understanding. So I will go at that point a little.
Carrol: But Doug combines a one-phrase zinger attacking dogmatism with his paragraph on irony. Now I think dogmatism is a bit more complex than Doug seems to think it is, and while I can't discuss it in detail here I can offer, in the context of this discussion of irony, a few provisional observations which might point the way to further exploration.
Doyle This is the context for Carrol's comments.
Carrol: First let's get down some of the obvious points. "Dogmatism," like "sectarianism," is an allusion to religion and religious dogma. Now the point (in Christianity anyhow) of dogma is in the proposition (quoted from memory) that "Whoso believeth in me shall attain eternal life." That is, for actual religious dogma, belief in and of itself is a positive good, in fact for Calvinist and Lutheran theologies, the greater good. (Hence the great debate, in which thousands or hundreds of thousands died, over faith vs. works.)
Doyle Dogmatism meant literally Church dogma in the middle ages. Though I would assume they did not associate the psychological rigidity that people mean now. This is where Carrol and I divide upon understanding. Because this definition cannot stretch beyond what religion or religious sects might do to the wider world. In other words it is not clear that dogmatism could have existed before the Catholic church, and if the Catholic Church somehow invented a mental phenomena how they did that.
Carrol Now, on the margins of Marxist discourse, one encounters a sprinkling of alleged marxists who seem to believe something like this, though I have never in 30 years of activity encountered more than a few in practice. A certain Klo M on the "old" L-I list insisted that everyone should believe that Stalin was a "genius in the art of government," and never did have an answer to my proposition that geniuses in the art of government were a dime a dozen. In other words, he seemed to think that merely believing in the purity of Stalin in itself directlty contributed to the coming of the revolution.
Doyle Lenin wrote a pamplet "Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder" because it was common for Marxist groupings to get some sort of position and for instance argue one can't vote in the Duma because it goes against principle.
But Lenin's pamplet doesn't give us a clue how Lenin is not a dogmatist except that he adheres to good old realist views of the world, whereas dogmatist are "idealist" or whatever. But there is a clue in Lenin's title, an "Infantile Disorder" that he understood the problem as the common perception of dogmatism now rather than as a "religious" disorder. The view now is that dogmatism is about compulsion and obsession appearing in political "belief". So much so is the obsession that no one can deviate from the line without being a traitor and enemy. The left and the right both exhibit these symptoms and we have many examples throughout the world. But the concept as Carrol uses it has lost its focus in what Carrol observes in Plato, which is the distortion of arguments. Certainly dogmatism plays out in the tortured logic of advocates. But logic is only the most easily apprehended element of the social appearance of dogmatism. It is in fact a continuum from other social relationships starting out in families with tyrants and dependents on upward into the huge corporate and military organizations. It is absurd to say dogmatism is religion, or political, since it could be so much like any old compulsive human activity, and that is the usual failing of the charge of dogmatism against religion and politics. In fact the Catholic Church couldn't have invented dogmatism since compulsion and obsession was observed in ancient writings, for instance narcissism. Instead, in any political context, or religious there is an attempt to manage mental processes of the social group. And It seems to be a failing of our understanding about the mind we cannot prevent the social group from veering into dogma.
Carrol But what seemed to characterize even the collection of "dogmatists" (scare quotes because so far undefined and thus not demonstrative of anything) was the belief that fundamental marxist principles could translate directly to practice. But it seems to me that a very common kind of critique of Marxism departs from exactly the same dogmatism. Critics discover that *Capital* (with its focus on class) does not tell us what to do when we get up tomorrow morning. It does not, for example, tell us what to think about race or abortion or the means of achieving unity or even what "unity" means. They then immediately decide that the theory is defective and that we must start all over again to build a new theory from the ground up. The first kind of dogmatism would try to cook dinner from the instructions contained in the three laws of thermodynamics; the second kind of dogmatism (which, frankly, I think dominates this list) would decide that the laws of thermodynamics were defective because they did not tell us how to cook dinner.
Doyle So Carrol is committing an error here as I understand how the brain works. He is saying that dogmatism is the dogmatist finding a cookbook recipe. Or more literally that a failed logic is the source of dogma. This is the same sort of understanding of dogmatism that Paul Rosenberg on LBO has of dogmatism. Perhaps Carrol sees that Marx doesn't have a recipe, but in any case Carrol asserts that a dogmatism dominates this list. This is exactly how Paul views Charles Brown because someone strongly asserts their belief system, and despite the best arguments Paul or Carrol can put forward that person stubbornly resists seeing the light. But in fact whatever the logical meaning of someone's LBO utterances underlying the assertion is always strong feelings. It is not the logic, or content of principles that makes one non-dogmatic. One cannot see that Marx is not dogma or recipe and avoid being dogmatic. The hidden problem is the association of intense feelings to how a human being understands the world. That is the source of dogma. In a real dogmatic sect, the rules are vague and changeable from day to day according to how the "Jim Jones" feels that morning. No amount of logic, or argument can shake that mood in the sect. It is held together not by the principles but by the feelings of powerful emotional attachments.
Carrol In any case, I think Doug owes us a developed discussion of the relationship, if any, of lack of irony and dogmatism rather than a merely dogmatic assertion that one leads to the other.
Doyle Doug may have been throwing off some quick off hand remark. In Carrol's context irony is fundamentally about the observation of two competing human minds with different understandings. They co-exist with one finding the other just not very efficacious. In that sense Doug is drawing some kind of allusion to dogmatism demanding a single emotional regime. That means to me that when one is inside the social cauldron of dogma no-one can be ironically different. Irony in Carrol's useage, is about some necessary smarty pants giving us the inside wink. It requires licensing and knowing, and insight that ordinary mortals don't have. Well that is a big fat crock. regards, Doyle Saylor